A recent study indicates that almost 20 per cent of corporate PCs are infected with some kind of malware. This was reported by threat protection company, Damballa in its newest State of Infections report.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that there was no correlation between infection and size. Despite the fact that larger organisations should ideally have better resourced IT and computer security departments, it was found that this wasn’t the case. They are seemingly no more efficiently protected than that of a small to medium sized business.

The organisation claimed, “company policies, more than company size, determined the cleanliness of any given network.”

One of the significant threats, it discovered, was organisations permitting contractors as well as other third parties full access to their corporate networks, with administrative privileges, in some cases, and not even limiting the accessibility via mobile devices. These organisations in particular were found to have an above average malware infection rate.

There has been an unbelievable rise in the ransomware variant this year, particularly as a result of the Gameover Zeus Trojan, which encrypts hard drives on PCs and demands a hefty fee in return for the decryption key.

The network who actually fronted Gameover Zeus have since been brought to justice for their actions following an international response. Unfortunately, this operation is already being re-established by its backers who are believed to be operating in Eastern Europe – possibly Russia or Ukraine.

Brian Foster, Damballa chief technology officer said: “We recommend that security teams work under the assumption that prevention is not fail proof, so the ability to automatically detect and accelerate the time to response is essential to minimizing risk.”